"Damn Right": Bush Boasts about Waterboarding

"Damn Right": Bush Boasts about Waterboarding

Former President George W. Bush continues to
be beyond shame. Those favored with an advance copy of his memoir, Decision Points, say it paints a picture
of a totally unapologetic Bush bragging, for example, about authorizing the CIA
to waterboard 9/11 “mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

According to newspaper accounts of the
memoir, Bush says he was asked by the CIA for permission to subject KSM to the
technique that creates the sensation of imminent drowning. His response was:
"Damn right."

For such a frank admission of high-level
criminality, we can say, with ample justification, Shame on Bush. But that
shame also sticks like Saran wrap to the rest of us – and especially to the
Fawning Corporate Media (FCM), which has soft-pedaled the significance of
Bush’s confession, and to his make-nice successor, Barack Obama, who has
refused to demand any accountability.

However, if we are still a democracy, we are
all complicit.

I don’t much care if this sounds judgmental.
You see, I was alive during World War II when there was torture galore; then it
was considered a grave offense. The Nuremberg Tribunals tried and convicted
Germany’s leaders for torture and other war crimes. In the war’s aftermath,
there were a very few serious people arguing that the world should simply look
forward, not backwards.The vast
majority knew there had to be a reckoning, even amid the many serious crises
that were facing a war-ravaged world.

The chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme
Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, insisted that the civilized world had no
choice but to demand justice. He looked the Nazi leaders straight in the eye
and told the court:

“No
charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants represent
… are the darkest and most sinister force in society,” Jackson said. “By their
fruits we best know them. Their acts have bathed the world in blood and set
civilization back a century. They have subjected their European neighbors
to every outrage and torture. …

“The
real complaining party at your bar is civilization. … Civilization asks whether
law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this
magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.”

The prescient Jackson foresaw a time when not
just the vanquished Nazis, but also America’s own leaders might deserve to be
put in the dock:

“But
the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars … is to make statesmen responsible
to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against
German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve any useful purpose
it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit
here now in judgment.”

Beyond
Nuremberg

Sadly, it is now clear that U.S. officials do
not believe they should be held to that universal standard, and that the
Nuremberg principles and other international laws need not apply to decisions
emanating from the White House.

Rather than facing a stern judgment for his
criminal actions, including approving torture and authorizing aggressive war
against Iraq, George Bush is about to be lionized in Dallas over his
presidential library, in bookstores for his memoir, and in the FCM. Two
articles in the New York Times’ “Week in Review” section on Sunday cited Bush’s
memoir as a possible turning point for Americans viewing the ex-President more
favorably. Neither article made any mention of Bush’s “Damn right” admission of
ordering torture.

Reporter Peter Baker wrote, “Perhaps it is
time to think about whether America has begun to reconsider its 43rd
president.” Columnist Maureen Dowd faulted “W’s decision-making” but said “his
story-telling is good.”

In his memoir, Bush exudes confidence that he
can achieve the resurrection of his popularity even as he boasts about his role
on torture. It was a mark of almost inconceivable hubris that he would
callously admit, this time in writing, his authorization of waterboarding.

But he did make that admission, which lobs
the ball into our court as American citizens. It is indeed time for the kind of
judgment Justice Jackson envisioned, not a celebratory book tour. Nor is it
time for breaking ground on a new presidential library to further cover up
crimes and falsehoods under a veneer of neo-con “scholarship.” (Progressives in
Dallas have taken to calling Bush’s new structure a “lie-bury.”)

Bush’s confidence – or arrogance – can be
traced, in part, to the power and tenacity of his acolytes, especially the
neocons who remain very influential in Washington.

But blame also must fall on cynical
politicians, especially in the House of Representatives, who thought they could
maximize Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 by ignoring their solemn oath to
honor the Constitution of the United States. Forget the Founders, who took
great pains to incorporate in the Constitution an orderly process for
impeaching and removing senior officials guilty of high crimes and
misdemeanors, foreseeing a time when that might be required.

The timid, calculating Democratic leadership
wimped out when it had the chance – actually, when it had a Constitutional as
well as moral obligation – to investigate, to build public support for action,
and to hold Bush accountable.

Misguided
Appeasement

Now, with the Republicans “shellacking” the
Democrats on Nov. 2 and returning to power in the House, here’s a question for
the outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her main malleable man, Judiciary
Committee chair John Conyers: How’s all that appeasement workin’ for ya?

Shame, as well, on the Fawning Corporate
Media (FCM) for joining Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in stoking the
hysteria that set the stage for the torture and then for caving in to White
House pressure to avoid calling torture torture.

Last but hardly least, shame on Bush’s timid
successor. Every time I hear that Obama is a former professor of Constitutional
law I find myself muttering, “And that would be the constitution of which
country?” The President’s soaring rhetoric falls flat fast the moment you stop
to ponder how he has betrayed his oath to see to it that the laws are
faithfully executed — in this case, by holding self-confessed torturers
accountable.

Shame, too, on those of us who decide to
remain silent as Bush openly brags about how he personally approved the use of
controlled-drowning for interrogation. The Spanish Inquisitors who applied for
the first patent on waterboarding had no qualms calling it what it is — tortura de agua.

“Unequivocally torture” is how U.S. Brigadier
General David Irvine described waterboarding, after teaching POW interrogation
and military law for 18 years.

Signs
of the Times

Before some of the revelations of the Bush
book hit the media last week, I had been wondering how much light, if any, the
memoir would shed on what Bush euphemistically labeled an “alternative set of
procedures for interrogation.”

Call me naïve, but I had found it too much of
a stretch to visualize a former president of the United States admitting in
writing to having ordered waterboarding, the same technique for which Japanese
and American soldiers have been tried, convicted and punished.

I am now trying to come to grips with the
notion that I have been living in the past, the kind of past that Bush lawyer
Alberto Gonzales would call “quaint” and “obsolete” (adjectives he applied to
the Geneva Conventions), a past inspired by the Nuremberg principles, where
there was at least a modicum of respect for the law—and such a thing a shame.

For over five months now, I have been unable
to get out of my head the photo
of a relaxed, tuxedo-clad George W. Bush in an arm-chair being interviewed
after a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on June 2. He says nonchalantly:

“Yeah,
we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.”[But waterboarding doesn’t save lives—just the opposite; see below.]

Cavalier
Torturer

Since I had not been able to shake that
insipid image of the cavalier torturer in the armchair, there is little excuse
for my being surprised at what Bush writes in his memoir about his role in
ordering torture and the pride he takes in having done so.

I should have been fully prepared for Decision Points, in which the
counterfeit cowboy assumes the very same posture of in-your-face-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it-when-even-the-wimps-sworn-to-enforce-the-law-are-too-timid-to-do-so.

I have seen much change in the body politic
since I arrived in Washington, DC, almost 48 years ago. There is one change,
however, that dwarfs all others in significance. It is that the country no
longer has, in any real sense, a free media. Read Jefferson and Madison on the
importance of a free media to preserving a democracy and you will be reminded
of how very BIG this change really is.

Don’t believe me? This coming week,
watch how the media gives George W. Bush a stay-out-of-jail pass as he starts
to peddle his lie-infested memoir on TV and in bookstores. Watch how the
moneyed interests he served lionize him at the groundbreaking for Bush’s “Presidential
Center” in Dallas on Nov. 16.

The accomplices of the FCM can be counted on
to suppress the truth about Bush and about their own complicity in cheerleading
for war, torture and the rest. As is well known, cheerleading is a team effort
demanding equal enthusiasm by all.

Maybe this is the real reason why NBC chose
this particular time to put Keith Olbermann on leave without pay. Olbermann would
never quite “get with the program.”

Unlike most of his pundit colleagues, he was
uncomfortable buying into the wisdom of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels, who famously said:

“If
you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it…It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its
powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and
thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

How does the Big Lie technique translate to
today? Simple. We will be getting a steady diet of this kind of punditry:
waterboarding is merely something that a bunch of liberals associate with
torture. And, besides, we waterboarded some of our own servicemen to show them
what it was like (as if no one has the mental capacity to distinguish between a
demonstration and the real thing). And, Bush’s confidence was bolstered by the
results of his painstaking efforts to acquire guidance from both the legal and
the medical profession. Right?

And most of the lawyers and doctors of this
great country will keep silent — even in the face of that kind of provocation.

Media
Attention

With the book not yet formally released, it
has been easier for the FCM to give Bush’s bragging on waterboarding relatively
little attention.

Last Thursday, after Bush’s comment on
torture hit the news, the Washington Post,
to its credit, ran on page two a report by staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith titled
“Bush says in memoir he approved waterboarding.” Smith even noted in his first
paragraph that “simulated drownings [are] a practice that many international
legal experts say was illicit torture.”

Smith highlights Bush’s admission that he
answered, "Damn right," when CIA thugs asked permission to waterboard
“9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the first of 183 times, and
indicates that Bush repeated the mantra that he would decide the same way again
“to save lives.”

That was Thursday.On Sunday the Post
hastened to inject the customary “balance” with a long panegyric defending
George W. Bush from “Five Myths” spread by “liberals” and other recalcitrants
unwilling to give him his due.

Did you know, for example, that Bush was
“personally invested in compassionate conservatism?” And that his “experience
as a born-again Christian led him to empathize with individuals’ personal
struggles and to respect the role of religion in civic life?” So writes
Professor Julian Zelizer of Princeton, whom the Post apparently paid bucks for “balance.”

The Post
must have given Zelizer an advance copy of Decision Points, since his 1,250-word essay dominating page three
of Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook
section was occasioned by the soon-to-be-unveiled memoir and shows he has read
it carefully. Zelizer does not mention Bush’s comments on authorizing
waterboarding — presumably because that can no longer be dismissed as a “myth.”

As for the bit about Bush being a born-again
Christian, this reminded me of another Bush admirer, his father, telling the
media shortly after 9/11 that his son George had read straight through the
Bible — twice!

Yep; two times! But did he miss, twice, “Thou
Shalt Not Kill?” Or Jesus’s instructions to his followers to love your enemy
and to treat others as you yourself would want to be treated? Does he need an
exegete to unpack those pronouncements?

Favorite
Bumper Sticker

To assist with his continuing theological
education—and help him keep in mind a key passage, I shall try to give the
former president my favorite bumper sticker when I see him at the
groundbreaking in Dallas. It reads:

“When
Jesus said Love Your Enemies I think he probably meant not to kill them.”

Or torture them.

Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to steer well clear of any such suggestion
that waterboarding might be torture. That it had had ample opportunity to read
and digest an advance copy of the book was clear on Nov. 4 when it published a
1,700-word article by star reviewer, Michiko Kakutani.

Kakutani was super-careful. Her only allusion
to what Bush wrote on waterboarding is buried in one sentence sandwiched into
dead center between the revelation that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had access
to “an Arabic translation of ‘Harry Potter’” and vapid comments on the economic
meltdown. There she inserted Bush’s claim that there would have been “a greater
risk that the country would be attacked,” had he not authorized waterboarding.

As for George W. Bush’s faith, Kakutani gives
pride of place to Bush’s agonizing choice between religion and alcohol, quoting
from the memoir: “Could I continue to grow closer to the Almighty or was
alcohol becoming my god?”

(With all due respect, had I known earlier
what direct instructions Bush would later claim he got from being close to the
“Almighty,” I would have sent him a monthly carton of whatever whiskey they
drink down there in Texas.)

In Sunday’s Times, Peter Baker’s article offers a generally flattering
portrayal of Bush and his book; Baker also neglects to mention Bush’s “Damn Right”
approval of waterboarding. Instead, he notes plaintively that “a good portion”
of Americans “still revile him for invading Iraq, waterboarding terror suspects
and presiding over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

Picky, picky, that portion of Americans!

“And yet” are the familiar words Baker, and
Professor Zelizer, use to start their various exculpatory paragraphs. No one
should be surprised to see the “and yet’s” dominate media coverage this week,
when major promotion of the book gets under way. (That’s assuming anyone is so
impolite as to ask about waterboarding/torture.)

Baker finishes his article with a familiar
sentiment from Bush: “Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I’m comfortable
with the fact that I won’t be around to hear it.” At least the man is
consistent. Interviewing Bush for his panegyric, Bush at War, Bob Woodward asked then-President Bush what he
anticipated with respect to his place in history. “History, we’ll all be dead,”
was Bush’s reaction.

Caring
Less…

I’d like to ask Peter Baker why he decided to
tuck that particular quote onto the end of his Times article on Sunday. Does he perhaps think it cute to have had
a President who couldn’t care less? Or what?

As for Bush himself, I suppose he does not
feel there is much danger from the possibility that some writer might prepare
an objective, truthful portrayal of his tenure in office any time soon. No
doubt he takes reassurance from the virtual certainty that the FCM would drown
any such author in decibels. And should someone suggest Bush be prosecuted for
war crimes, as he should be, that person would likely be sent off to do penance
with Keith Olbermann. (So glad I do not have to depend on the FCM to earn a
living.)

…and
Making Stuff Up

As for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, according to
Reuters, Bush claims KSM was “difficult to break” but that waterboarding did
the trick. “He disclosed plans to attack American targets with anthrax…among
other breakthroughs,” writes Bush.

There he goes again, making stuff up. There
is nothing to support that claim, and lots to refute it. For example, David
Rose, a serious investigative journalist writing two years ago for Vanity Fair, conveyed the appraisal of a
former senior CIA officer who read all the reports on Mohammed’s interrogation.

His verdict? “Ninety percent of it was
total “bullsh*t.” In addition, a former Pentagon analyst told Rose that the
interrogation of Mohammed produced no actionable intelligence.

KSM himself has boasted derisively about
sending CIA and FBI agents scurrying around the world on wild-goose chases,
following up on the “leads” he gave them. I imagine that, by his 183rd
waterboarding session, KSM may have identified terrorists he claimed were
responsible for global warming.

Other of the Bush’s claims are demonstrably
false — contradicted by the FBI, for example. Bush repeats the old saw about
KSM yielding information leading to the capture of one of his top aides, Ramzi
bin al-Shibh. But that information came from a different terrorist operative
who was interviewed using traditional, legal methods.

The
So-What Yawns

By and large, the “so-what” yawns that have
greeted the initial reporting on torture is further testimony to the sorry fact
that raw fear can lead to the forfeiture of the ability of Americans to distinguish
between right and wrong — even regarding heinous offenses like torture. Sadly,
this is made all the easier by the craven silence of the institutional churches
and synagogues which, with very few exceptions, cannot find their voice — just
as the Catholic and Lutheran churches could not find theirs during the Thirties
in Germany.

Behind the stained glass, the end can now be subtly
seen to justify the means, if that’s what it takes to head off contentiousness
in the church community and keep pews and collection plates full. Anything
goes; whatever is necessary to “keep us safe” is the mantra.

If a rare (prophetic) voice does enter the
dialogue with a reminder that many of the prophets, including Jesus of
Nazareth, were tortured to death, that voice is quickly silenced. Can’t you
see? This is different; the terrorists hate us and are out to kill the lot of
us.

What rankles most is the success Bush and
Cheney have had, with the corporate media support on which they depend, in
stoking Americans’ fear to the point where waterboarding and other forms of
torture have become widely accepted as necessary to “keep us safe.”

Hidden is the supreme irony that torture has
been doing just the opposite. In fact, it has proven the most powerful fillip
to violence against us. Now who should find that surprising? Bush’s policy on
interrogation has been directly linked by U.S. interrogators to the killing of
American troops — in Iraq, for example.

The senior U.S. Air Force interrogation
specialist who uses the name Matthew Alexander and who conducted more than 300
interrogations in Iraq and supervised over 1,000 more lamented those additional
killings, “It's a hard pill to swallow, but true.” Alexander, a Bronze Star
awardee, says that as many as 90 percent of the foreign fighters captured in
Iraq said they joined the fight against the U.S. because of the torture
conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Former General Counsel to the Navy Alberto
Mora made the same point in testimony before Congress:

“There
are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second
identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their
effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively,
the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

It is a given, then, that the Bush torture
policy made Americans less — not more — safe.

Getting
Desired Answers

Are waterboarding and other harsh
interrogation techniques “highly effective,” as Bush reportedly claims in his
memoir? The short answer is No.

On Sept. 6, 2006, the very day Bush first
bragged publicly about his “alternative set of procedures for interrogation”
and appealed for legislation allowing the CIA to continue using them, the then
head of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, took a very different tack.

Conducting a Pentagon briefing shortly before
the President gave his own speech on the other side of the Potomac, Kimmons
underscored the fact that the revised Army manual for interrogation is in sync
with the Geneva treaties.

Then, conceding past “transgressions and
mistakes,” Kimmons updated something I learned 48 years ago as a second
lieutenant in Army infantry/intelligence:

“No good intelligence is going to come from
abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence
of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Grabbing the headlines the following day was
Bush’s admission that the CIA has taken “high-value” captives to prisons abroad
for interrogation using “tough” techniques prohibited by the revised Army field
manual — and by Geneva, for that matter. Gen. Kimmons displayed uncommon
courage in facing into that wind.Too bad our political leaders are afraid to follow his example.

Question: If Bush’s “alternative set of
procedures for interrogation” adds to the queuing in front of terrorist
centers, so to speak, and if they don’t yield good intelligence, why use them? Former
FBI Special Agent/Attorney Coleen Rowley and I have co-authored articles for
Consortiumnews.com, which address this very understandable question. Let
me refer you especially to “‘Justifying’
Torture: Two Big Lies.”

Briefly, if your aim is to extract untruthful
information (like “intelligence” on those non-existent but close ties between
al-Qaeda and Iraq, remember?), nothing works better than torture. If you want
to intimidate real or imagined troublemakers, torture is a natural for proving
that what Lord Acton said about absolute power is horribly real.

And, if you have a streak of sadism, harsh
interrogation techniques can give grand release.

You are not likely to have seen much in the
FCM about Bush’s bent toward sadism. Justin Frank, MD, psychiatrist and
professor at George Washington University, who authored Bush on the Couch, has helped us veteran intelligence officers
explore the implications. Dr Frank explains:

“Bush’s
certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive
behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to
shooting his siblings with a b-b-gun, to branding fraternity pledges with
white-hot coat hangers.

“His
comfort with cruelty is one reason he can be so jocular with reporters when
talking about American casualties in Iraq. Instead of seeing a president in
anguish, we watch him publicly joking about the absence of ‘weapons of mass
destruction’ in Iraq, in the vain search for which so many young Americans
died.”

Patchwork
of False Beliefs

The following excerpt is from a Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity memorandum of July 27, 2007, which included
some additional observations with regard to how Bush looks at truth, as
suggested by Dr. Frank: “Dangers of a Cornered Bush”:

“His
pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into
what he asserts is the whole truth... he lies — not just to us, but to himself
as well...What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt — for language, for
law, and for anybody who dares question him.... So his words mean nothing. That
is very important for people to understand.”

A useful reminder as Bush comes back into
public view in the coming weeks.

Torture is not wrong just because there are
laws against it. There are laws against it because it is wrong. Intrinsically
wrong; always wrong — like genocide, rape, slavery. And as one scholar put it,
“to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun
rises in the east.”

President Obama and Attorney General Eric
Holder have each said that waterboarding is torture. But, sadly, neither has
the guts to look in the rear-view mirror and do what the Constitution and
common decency require.

In the wake of World War II, civilized
nations came to a general consensus on all this, and the ensuing laws and
international conventions reflected that consensus. George Bush is simply the
most visible leader to employ lawyers and doctors — and even a stray theologian
here and there — to help him carve out exceptions to that consensus.

True, on occasion a moral theologian will
summon the courage to speak out. Professor William Schweiker of the Chicago
Divinity School, for example, has heaped scorn on the familiar scenario of the
lone knower of the facts whose torture is thought to be able to save millions
of lives. He notes that such is “the stuff of bad spy movies and bad exam
questions in ethics courses.”

With specific reference to waterboarding,
Schweiker admonishes Christians, in particular:

“Not
to fall prey to fear and questionable reasoning and thus continue to support an
unjust and vile practice that demeans the nation’s highest political and moral
ideals, even as it desecrates one of the most important practices and symbols
(Baptism) of the Christian faith.”

From
the Professional Military

Interrogator Matthew Alexander reports, “I have been contacted by World War II
veterans who were outraged that the Bush administration so easily dismissed the
American principles that millions of veterans gave their lives to defend. They
pointed out what I have said all along: we cannot become our enemy in trying to
defeat him.”

World War II General George C. Marshall
warned, "Once an Army is involved in
war, there is a beast in every fighting man which begins tugging at its chains.
... A good officer must learn early on how to keep the beast under control both
in his men and in himself."

And in 1775, as the birth of America hung in
the balance, General George Washington said,
"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any
prisoner...by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves
and their country."

With George W. Bush’s “Damn right” permission
to waterboard – and the FCM’s flaccid response – America has certainly come a
long way. Again, I believe we are all complicit—and that would be doubly so, if
we emulate the passive stance of the “good Germans” of the Thirties.

Bush has brought the issue of torture to a
head. Shame on us all, if we allow the recent history of waterboarding and
other torture techniques to go unchallenged and to end up defining us.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Further

Surrounded by a massive police presence, the country's top law enforcement official told a group of carefully screened students at Georgetown's Law School that, "In this great land, the government does not tell you what to think or what to say." In his speech, only announced the day before, Sessions went on to denounce uppity knee-taking football players and defend his boss' call, hours before, for them to be fired. We may need to upgrade the ole Irony Alert buzzer. It can't keep up.